I was contacted via Facebook a while ago by Jan Sluijmans. Jan and I go a long way back, we met when I was 18, him having his recording studio Tristone at the same squad-house I was living in back then. I just started my study in photography and I think Jan gave me my first commissioned assignment. Together with Alain Maessen from Brutesque we created this head-logo which you can see below. Shot on film back then (2003), scanned and re-edited in 2021.
He saw my new website and loved the dark melancholic photographs. He wrote to me saying he was working on an album, a combination of soundscape, jazz noir, drone and neo-classical music, and thought my images would match perfectly. So, I’m currently in the process of creating the artwork for this album. This artwork is not merely about making photographs but also about making moving footage, teasers at first, but will be about clips for entire tracks. A whole new ballgame for me! I’ve wanted to do more with moving images for a while now and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to finally go for it. With the monochrom. It has a movie recording button..yes, it’s that cool!
The first teaser came to be a bit on purpose really. We were driving back from Liège after a day of making photographs and I started filming. Twilight was already setting in, providing this fantastic ambience and the footage was so great I immediately thought of a track from Jan. It’s far from perfect; no stabilizer etc but I love it. I love my camera. I love these kinds of projects!
The second teaser was for the announcement of the album. In my head popped up the image of the cover coming up in the development bath. So, I printed the cover in negative on a large transparent sheet and went in the darkroom with it. These things give me so much fun; it’s experimenting, learning new things along the way, also in regards to editing video. It’s just great!
I’ve recently finished the third teaser. Jan invited a few artists to use their instrument to freely play over his original tracks. One of them is now being mastered. This particular artist also sent a video of him playing his instrument which I used as part of the teaser. It will be published soon. I will also be creating more track-length clips during the next period of time so there’ll be more. Lots more 🙂
Photography Contrastique - Alternative Photographic Processes 